Foreign Research Information Center (FRIC) of Ewha Centennial Library received the best grade “S” for the Operating Evaluation conducted from November 2015 to October 2016.
Ewha’s FRIC was established in August 2011 as a part of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Korean Education & Research Information Service (KERIS)’s project. FRIC aims to collect foreign scholarly journals and establish a storage system for students and researchers to use, and contribute to strengthening the academic competitiveness of Korea. Following the honor of receiving the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Award last year, the school has made headlines again.
The Operating Evaluation assessed different universities’ FRIC in terms of its operating strategy, system, results, and development. Among the criterion, Ewha ranked high on promotion of the service, performance on providing journals, cooperation, and the quality of journal selection. Currently offering approximately 2,470 foreign academic journals, the Ewha FRIC aims to extend it further.
“Ewha’s FRIC has been highly regarded to provide outstanding academic sources,” said Chung Yeon-kyung, the director of Ewha Centennial Library. “However, we will not settle for the present and try harder to utilize the diverse sources of the library so that the school can continue its contribution to society.”
As much as the school’s FRIC puts in effort to satisfy students and researchers, the users also showed positive feedback in return. Shown in the FRIC User Satisfaction Survey of 2016 conducted by KERIS, 87.5 percent of the users were satisfied with the service of Ewha’s FRIC in 2015. Furthermore, in 2016, the satisfaction level of the service increased to 89.7.
However, some users also said the Ewha FRIC has room for further improvement. User feedback from the KERIS survey included requests for more resources from Asian countries and active promotion of the service by the Office of Education. Some respondents also showed hope for a more convenient way of requesting multiple academic journals at a time, as the center currently only allows one request at a time.